286 serial port woes

[Derek E. Terveer]

In article <8804 at alice.UUCP>, debra at alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra) writes:
> Something is missing in the above reasoning. Adding memory does not give
> your cpu more MIPS!

I didn't mean to imply a performance improvement through gained mips.

> A Xenix or Unix box with very little memory suffers in 2 ways:
> 1) there is not enough memory to have a reasonably sized I/O buffer pool,
>    so most of the file I/O involves real disk I/O.
> 2) there is not enough memory to hold all processes so there is a lot of
>    swapping.

Yes, i estimate that my xenix system, with its 512K, was doing an incredible
amount of swapping most of the time.  In fact it seemed that the disk activity
led was on about 20 to 22 hours a day.

Concerning your other points about larger amounts of memory, i suppose that the
amount of memory that is the point of no performance gain would depend on how
active your system was and how many processes are required (want (:-)) to be in
memory.

Wouldn't you agree that a system with 3 active users on it would still show
some improvement beyond, say 4M, than a system with just one user on it?

derek
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